Concepts

As explained in this post, I’ve engaged the services of a good friend of mine to paint me a picture of Lancaster LM475. I’ve decided to start an occasional series of posts dealing with ‘the process’ of how the painting develops over the next couple of months.

Steve and I have been throwing ideas around for the last few weeks, and now we are starting to see some concepts ‘on screen’, if not exactly on canvas yet. The traditional method for deciding on a composition, Steve says, is to actually sketch out ideas on paper. Those days are no more, thanks to Photoshop. Steve mocked up a proposed composition using a CGI image that I’d found on the Lancaster Archive Forum (thanks Peter) and a few other bits and pieces:

Already the feel of the scene is coming through…

The beauty of Photoshop, of course, is that even those like myself, suffering a severe lack of skills in the drawing department, can have a fiddle with some things. So I found our lonely ‘erk’ a work stand…

…then decided the stand (and ‘erk’ – who had, Steve tells me, been rudely snatched from a USAAF Lightning and suddenly transported into the RAF) would work better on the other wing…

So I bounced both of my ‘amendments’ to Steve to throw in to the mix.

These were always intended to be very crude representations of an overall concept for the painting. Details like the bicycles and any other bits of the flotsam usually found near a dispersal haven’t arrived on-scene yet. But they can come later.

About

When I was young my father showed me a small blue felt-covered notebook. It was the flying logbook of my great uncle Jack, a Lancaster navigator in WWII.
Jack's crew was made up of seven young men, all from vastly different backgrounds. They were normal, everyday lads caught up in extraordinary circumstances. This blog charts my search for their story and where it is leading me.